娇色导航

Welcome to today's episode, which is sponsored by Vasion Print. Formerly known as Printer Logic, Vasion lets you simplify your I.T. infrastructure by replacing those resource intensive print servers with direct IP. Serverless printing.

With its built in AI and automations, Vision Print is a cloud native solution that helps eliminate one of the biggest drains on your I.T. resources. See more at Vasion.com.

We are here at IDC 60th Annual Directions

Conference here in San Jose, California, and I'm delighted to say I'm joined today by Ryan Reith, who is Group Vice President for Worldwide Device Trackers, for IDC.

And I'd love to hear, Ryan, your thoughts in a sentence or two about the state of play, the general state of play with AI and the IT buyers that you were talking to.

What's top of mind to that? Sure. Well, thanks for having me here today. So my focus is really on devices. So sort of the end user client.

And right now when it comes to AI and it, it it's really the educational folks, you know, so it knows that, you know, we're sort of starting with AI in the cloud.

It's, it's there's a lot of discussion about moving this on premise for multiple reasons. Security increases latency and cost. And then there's that last mile will bring you down to AI that can run on the hardware itself.

So, you know, really I think it is trying to grapple with, when is the right time to invest? These machines cost more than the average PC, obviously.

And when's the right time to invest where there's a guaranteed ROI? And I think right now it's struggling a little bit with all of the other AI tasks they have. And really waiting for that, that ROI to be defined. And it'll get there.

But where I would say in the preseason, not even the first day. Yeah.

No, that's definitely something, something we hear on the on the 娇色导航side, talking to item buyers that are finding that return on investment is a really tricky thing. And I suppose maybe efficiency is one thing that people drive trying to drive with.

And okay, so using AI to drive efficiency within organizations potentially could have a major impact on the workplace.

As you what can organizations and employees look forward to? What is what is the impact on end user devices. So fundamentally. Yeah, absolutely. So I mean, the short answer is they should expect their their current tasks and day to day to fundamentally change.

Now when that actually happens, time will tell. But the roles and responsibilities that we know today will fundamentally change.

That is a fact. It's going to be all aspects of AI. And really, it should be embraced in a way to be, a more productive, more efficient company. You know, with change comes, you know, uncertainty and uncomfortableness, and that's to be expected.

But it's really going to improve the efficiency of the employees who were working on products or services for a company.

And even within the in the organization, you know, it should expect their own tools and their own processes to to increase in terms of the productivity and completely change the way they handle things. Again, change will create uncomfortableness.

But but it will bring, more benefit and more efficiency in the long run. So as we get to like a thousand tiny little efficiencies for each individual, wrapping up to make a major impact on the internal. Yeah.

And I think in the reality of some roles and responsibilities will no longer be needed, but they're going to evolve to other things. So, you know, people shouldn't be too hung up on this. You know, people won't be needed because they will.

It's just going to be what they're needed for is going to be a pivot in a much more productive, and opportunistic future, in my opinion. Okay.

So like so that's, that's thinking about the inside of an organization right now. One thing we talk about sometimes is I outside. So, you know, I infused into products and services that an organization has. And we're hearing a lot of noise about AI PCs and other hardware devices.

So from what you're saying, you know, you think there's definitely a future in that.

But should it buyers be all in on the IPC? You know, can we think of any killer use cases at this point? We should not wait and see. Yeah, it's definitely the wait and see.

There's there is no one that there's no company that if you don't invest in a true AI PC this year, 2025, that you'll be left behind.

You should be working on the strategy. You should have an understanding of what the benefits will be when those use cases come. Because, as you mentioned, they're just not there today.

But there's a lot of investment that's happening from silicon players like Intel, is working with they've publicly said over 100 ISVs on AI solutions that can be brought and utilized on the IPC.

So there's a lot of work that's being done, but we're not quite there yet. So it's, it's kind of wait and see.

I have to say, I think that's advice that, our sort of viewers would really like to hear, honestly, like, like you've got to be planning for it, but don't panic because you're not there right now. Yeah, absolutely.

And it's, it's it's understanding that some people would panic. Right. You've got all this buzz. You want to do everything right. This is that last mile when it comes to within the corporation, whether it's used for inside, outside or both. Okay.

I'm thinking about, kind of a specific slice of that, which is the idea of the workplace, of the future.

Again, that is the future, right? But, you know, sign up the human workforce for success in an AI driven world. Like, what kind of things should it decision makers be thinking about this?

Well, it's really one of the critical, tools in the needs of, the company, but but realistically, you know, breaking it down to the individual divisions.

But even within the division, there's going to be bifurcation of the need for, these more sophisticated pieces, and then more mainstream, you know, which is more sophisticated, essentially being Chennai PCs.

In the past, we used to see that more like departments, you know, like graphics design would have specific pieces, the rest of the organization. And now it's actually going to be within divisions.

You're going to see that in the early stages, because there's only going to be a need for maybe 10%. That's hypothetical. 10% of this team on product development would need this or software design.

Maybe the lead 10% would use this to accelerate tools that they're building, and eventually that's going to be 100%. Yeah, it's just a matter of one couple of years. Yeah.

Okay. That makes total sense, because then what you're doing there is you're applying a workforce strategy and then the application of technology to it. Absolutely. The kids can do this. So we're going to do that. Absolutely.

And by the way, on the outside there's there's a million examples of things that have, developers and stuff just licking their chops.

I mean, there's independent developers that used to need, you know, a big team. They can now leverage code that's been written and open sourced and so forth to do incredible things. Things are going to move very quickly. So game developers are looking at this and utilizing this quickly.

Bringing all software developers, people trying to implement, changes to their business processes on the outside, you know, field service workers, anything that they're looking to automate. Yes.

Even more so with AI. Okay. And there's there's an implication from the at the device level. Absolutely. Okay. So like that's that's a huge amount to think about there. And I feel like we can talk for hours, but we haven't got hours.

So if you could sort of boil it down to kind of what's one piece of advice you would give for the IT buyers that you work with, around like AI in the future?

What should they be thinking about doing right now in 2025? Yeah, in 2025. Right now, when it comes to hardware and devices, prepare yourself. Understand what's out there today, why it's not in probably as high demand as the supply side of the industry would want.

And then try to follow along with these timelines of what's going to be coming.

So really the the key is less on who's making the product. The Lenovo's the Dell's. It's more on the silicon side right now. What is Intel doing? What is AMD doing? What is Nvidia doing in Qualcomm.

That's really what they should be following, because the next generation of what those launch into PCs is most likely what many are going to adopt in 2026 for their IPC strategy in their corporation.

That's what it should be focusing on today to to get knowledge for for tomorrow. Excellent. That's great advice Ryan. Really appreciate it. Thank you so much. Great. Thank you.